Fertile Ground

“Where is it?” she asks.

I point. The hole in the skyline really isn’t obvious. Most of the buildings around the former site of the World Trade Center are blocked from view from our spot on Canal Street. The Millenium Hilton Hotel, and other glass box skyscrapers were visible to the left, but the buildings to the right, north of the site, are shorter and older. From where we stand, the empty air looks normal.

Manhattan is long and narrow. Keeping a mental map is easy, even in the Village and Tribeca where the streets are named instead of numbered. The WTC was on the southwest corner of the island, give or take, snuggled close to the Hudson River. Just walk that way.

We had started from our hotel on 54th Street and 7th Avenue. A vacation indulgence in a favorite pastime, walking in The City, eventually turned into a pilgrimage of sorts. We meandered downtown, cross town and back, through Greenwich Village and SoHo. The further south we went, the more sure our eventual destination became.

We are both from the NYC area, my wife from the Island, myself from Queens. Though we had transplanted ourselves into the forest of upstate New York fifteen years earlier, the events of 9/11 had the added dimension for us of being a personal hometown violation. Neither of us had visited the site yet.

We had put almost ten miles on our feet by the time we hit the roadblock on West Broadway. Hardhats. Machinery. A block further on, there is a wide open space. Manmade. Unnatural. We walk a block over to Church Street, make a right and approach the hole in the city from the northeast corner.

A wide sidewalk, punctuated by new subway entrances that haven’t changed in style for half a century or more, bordered on the right by a high, steel fence. Beyond the fence, a construction site, wide and deep. Opposite, to the south, stands a skyscraper shrouded in black

The pilgrim/sightseers move along the fence, taking pictures, straining to see... what? Not much from here; construction workers, pick-ups purposely moving up and down ramps from the new metal platform on the east side of the site. Further in and deeper down is hidden from view.

Moving south. Occasional panels hung on the fence document the history of the area, followed by panels documenting the names of the victims.

The Cross took me by surprise. I had heard the story. Two days after the 11th, construction workers found these cross shaped beams in a pit in the rubble. It had subsequently been mounted and blessed. I am conflicted by this image. This event can be owned by no religious entity. I don’t believe this cross is proof of anything other than the laws of probability.

But its symbolism is stunning, nevertheless, and the step past it was like a step through a door.

A sense of unreality creeps into my peripheral vision: tourists taking pictures, an Asian film crew trying to gain admittance at an access ramp, a line of off duty firefighters posing for a photograph, souvenir vendors hawking little acrylic figures of the Twin Towers, tourists turned pilgrims gazing through the fence, the summer sun’s heat radiating off the sidewalk.

To the other side, a vast space surrounded by buildings somewhat healed of their outer wounds. Somewhat. One on the north has plywood for windows. Its neighbor, forever missing its top five floors, has scaffolding hanging here and there where work continues repairing the stone damaged by I-beams turned into missiles by an exploding 747. To the south the shrouded building; 40 stories, ominous, and its neighbor; stone, empty-eyed, vacant but with a huge heart painted on its side in the colors of the American flag. To the west, the World Financial Center and east, the Millenium Hotel, Century 21 Department Store and the Liberty Tower, structures of the crystalline city, sparkling like a vision of Oz.

Turn the corner and follow the fence along the south side of what was once Tower 2. The depth of the site opens up, revealing in the far side wall six stories of what looks to have been a parking lot, below street level. The area crawls with people, trucks and heavy machinery busy with the work of resurrection. Behind us the shrouds of 130 Liberty Street sway in the breeze, revealing utility lights within a wall-less erector set of a building.

We reach the end of the fence and the heart of Ground Zero, a man named Harry Roland. At first I ignore him, like a true New Yorker, and am content to examine the notes left on the plywood around the base to the walkway over the West Side Highway. Notes from all over the country. Most asking for God’s blessing on America. Some poetry. References to Bible chapters. The voice to my left keeps a constant monologue interspersed with practiced slogans meant to gain attention. My wife approaches him. I follow.

Harry is not an official presence here. He is dressed casually, looks to be about forty, is muscular, clear eyed and well spoken. He has a set script he launches into when his loud, “This is history! Don’t let it be a mystery!” gathers at least one listener. He speaks with intensity, his delivery is fresh. He holds eight by ten laminated color photos and a fistful of informational printouts he gives away for free. There’s no cup or hat to drop a dime into. He doesn’t want your money, just your attention.

Harry seems to know every detail of the World Trade Center. Every detail of its life and its death. He will make sure you know that of the nine buildings destroyed, “seven, yes seven, were World Trade Center buildings. Bet your teacher doesn’t know that, young man. You can go to school next month and teach your teacher something.” Harry looks you in the eye. When he speaks, he speaks to you. He wants you to ‘get it’. He needs you to ‘get it’.

Harry was a tour guide in the World Trade Center. Harry was late for work on September 11th, 2001, because he had to take his son to his first day of kindergarten. He, like so many fortunate others, just wasn’t here that  day.

Sometimes, however, not being there has its downside: “Why me?”

That day marked him, marked him powerfully enough to keep him coming back to the same spot six days a week, six hours a day, for two years and counting. Now, not only still giving his tour, but compulsively giving testimony, like some living combination of John the Baptist and the Ancient Mariner.

He directs our attention to 130 Liberty Street, standing watch over Ground Zero like a widowed mourner. Harry tells us the building has to come down and is being dismantled by hand. It can’t be imploded because of the subway running beneath. There is concern, he says, because one strong Nor’easter can blow that building, still standing forty stories high, down. It will take a year, through another stormy winter, to finish the job.

People tend to consider events in discreet blocks of time. September 11th, 2001, as a physical event, had a beginning, a middle and an end. Yet that tower belies this idea, and stands as a reminder that the pace may have slowed, but it’s not over yet. A significant thought, that.

We leave Harry and take some of his mark with us.

The rest of our pilgrimage continues to be filled with jarring contrasts: The World Financial Center with its granite, marble, wide staircases and Winter Garden, an enormous atrium containing sixteen fully grown palm trees looking out on the Hudson River; back past Ground Zero and Harry to the Liberty Street Farmer’s Market; finally to St. Paul’s Chapel, oldest building in Manhattan and relief center for heroes in the days following 9/11.

The Chapel, with its old cemetery once buried in ash, dust, glass, spreadsheets, emails and sticky notes, doubles as a museum now, with exhibits of artifacts, video displays, and signed banners from around the country hanging from the gallery. There, also, on the side, is a box with one chair and bench; the private seat of George Washington, President of the United States, while the nation’s capitol resided in New York City. Exhausted firefighters slept on that bench in the harried days after the fall of the towers.

Over the box hangs the first painting of the Great Seal, that carefully crafted symbol of the Presidency: a great eagle grasping thirteen arrows to the left, and an olive branch with thirteen leaves to the right. That eagle has been looking toward the olive branch for two hundred years.

I consider the significance of that, and wonder who we are. I consider the jumble of images and symbols absorbed this day, a veritable pool of nascent myth, and wonder who we are becoming.

~Michael Lambert, 2003

(Now, meet Harry Rowland. This video is fine. However, Harry also inspires intimidating questions not discussed in this video. If you're interested, just Google his name and look around..The Guide Still Standing, Part 2.)